by Leslie Ford
“Remember, please, Mrs. Latham. I haven’t got time to bother with you. You keep out of this.—Just coming, Buck.”
I don’t know how soon it was after he went out that I was conscious of Wilkin’s presence, quietly picking up the used glass and refilling the thermos ice tub. I do know that I suddenly had the odd sensation that he had been there a long time. It was a sort of psychological atmospheric continuity— if, as Edith St. Martin always says, you know what I mean— in which no element as foreign as the suety butler had suddenly or newly introduced itself.
“Is Mr. McClean senior staying for dinner, madame?” he inquired politely.
“I don’t know,” I said. “He doesn’t normally, does he?”
“No, madame. But I heard Miss Lowell call down and ask him to stay as he went into the library. He said he would.”
“Then I fancy he will,” I said.
“I didn’t know if madame would object…”
I wasn’t sure for a moment whether he meant I would, or Iris.
He picked up the tray. Then he set it down and cleared his throat.
“I wonder if I might be so bold as to ask your advice, madame,” he said quietly.
I suppose there’s nothing any woman likes so much as to have her advice asked. Who asks it doesn’t matter… and it’s never till it’s been given that she even suspects that her leg, in a manner of speaking, has been pulled. So I quite forgot Colonel Primrose’s elaborate instructions about minding my own business.
“I don’t know whether you have heard that Mr. Nash had been receiving anonymous letters… for some time now,” he said.
I nodded.
“Then perhaps you will advise me what to do with this one, which came in the usual way this morning.”
He put his hand inside his coat and brought out an envelope that I recognized instantly, with a sudden warping of my heart, as a mate to the one I’d seen Gilbert St. Martin take from his pocket.
He handed it to me. I took it without looking up at him… knowing as I took it that I shouldn’t, that of course I should have said “Go get Colonel Primrose, we’ll give it to him.” Either that, or got up myself at once and taken it to him. I knew it then, I know it far better now. And yet… if I were put in the same position again, I’ve no doubt at all I’d do exactly what I did then; not from reason—far from it—but just from a sort of plain primitive fear. The black shadow in which Iris Nash had stood had moved away a little. I couldn’t bear the idea of jerking it back; and even before I read the letter I held in my hand I knew that that was what it must do. There’s no use in my trying to find a rational explanation for that moment. Distrusting Wilkins as I did, with his pale moon face and fat white hands, I still must have believed his “No, madame—certainly not,” when I asked him if he had read the letter. And that surely must be the great trouble of a conspiracy, knowing who’s in it and who isn’t, and who’s on which side or both.
“Where did you find it?” I asked. It was a stamped envelope like the other one, but there was no cancellation mark.
“On the front door step under the mat, madame. This morning when I brought in the milk.”
“Is that where the others have been?”
“Except those that came in the post, madame.”
As Gilbert St. Martin’s had done, I remembered. I sat there with this one in my hand for a long time. It was so easy to see the shadowy figure creeping through the night, slipping this thing under the mat, creeping away again. If I couldn’t see the figure plainly enough to tell whether it was man or woman, I could see, so clearly, the mask of hatred and malice it would wear, under cover of the dark, when there was no need to dissemble and hide what lay in the tortuous alleys of its soul.
“You can leave it with me,” I said.
“Very good, madame.”
He picked up the tray and went out. I opened the envelope. I noticed as I did that the edge of the flap was thin, as if it had been opened carefully and pasted back again. And that, of course, was my second chance to stop all this like a sensible woman and go at once to Colonel Primrose… and I funked it a second time.
My hand shook a little as I unfolded the cheap greyish paper and saw the same purple block letters, laboriously and unevenly printed there.
MAKE MR MCCLEAN TELL WHAT HE KNOWS ABOUT HER CARRYING ON WITH SOMEBODY
A FRIEND
If I’d known as much about anonymous letters then as I’ve found out since, I’d have known, of course, that this particular one was so true to form as to be virtually stereotyped, and that there’s hardly ever a murder case that doesn’t precipitate from one to a hundred of them onto the already heavy-laden hands of the police. I wouldn’t have been so bothered by it, perhaps, if I hadn’t seen the letter Gilbert St. Martin had got. As it was, it seemed to me nothing but a cruel psychopathic reiteration of something the police already believed—something I had no doubt A. J. McClean was at that very moment laying, thoroughly and in detail, in front of Captain Lamb and Colonel Primrose in the library just across the hall.
However, I was merely trying, I suppose, to find some justification for the fact that I did not give Colonel Primrose the letter. I folded it and put it back in the envelope, and when I heard the door open, and heard Steve Donaldson and Angie coming in, with Mac close behind them, I calmly put it in my sweater pocket.
“Thought somebody said you went home,” Angie was saying.
“I did,” Steve Donaldson said—a little curtly, I thought. “I came back.”
“You’d better watch your step. They’ll be dragging you out in irons as a murderer hanging round the scene of the crime.”
I looked up in surprise. The words were all right—I mean, just what you would expect Angie Nash to be saying—but the tone was wrong. It was neither lighthearted nor friendly; and if the appalling events of the last day or so could explain, easily enough, why it wasn’t lighthearted, they didn’t explain the unfriendliness.
Mac grinned. “It goes for a lot of us,” he said. “Even A. J. He hasn’t been here so much since…”
He came to an uncomfortable halt. “—I mean, for a long time.”
He looked even more uncomfortable then, for at that moment his uncle walked in. A. J. McClean looked twenty years older, it seemed to me, than he had fifteen minutes before. It couldn’t have been all my imagination, for the expression on Mac’s face changed instantly.
He even took a quick step toward him. “Are you sick, sir?”
A. J. shook his head shortly.
“Colonel Primrose wants to speak to you, Grace.” He turned back to Mac. “I have something very serious to tell you young men.”
I closed the door behind me, realizing with something of a start that neither Mac nor Angie, who were in various ways among the people most interested, knew anything of the disappearance of Randall Nash’s fortune.
I crossed the hall and knocked at the library door. No one answered, so I pushed it open and looked in. Lowell Nash was standing by the window. She didn’t turn, not until I said “A. J. said Colonel Primrose wanted me. Where is he?”
When she did turn then I was shocked at the sullen frozen face, small and tense and white against the deep wine colored curtains.
“I don’t know,” she said, in her hardest and most brittle voice. “Except that he and that… that policeman are going over the house—as if they expect to find a million dollars stowed away in a dresser drawer.”
I gathered she knew about her father’s money being gone. I drew a deep breath and tried to rally myself, knowing just how she was going to feel about it before she spoke another word. And I was quite right.
“She’s a lot smarter even than I thought she was,” she said, with a kind of controlled quiet bitterness.
I didn’t say anything. It was too ridiculous, all this going round and round the narrow angry circle of Lowell’s feeling against her stepmother. Nothing anybody could say would change it, and obviously this new business was only bound to make it worse.
“She’s probably given it to Gilbert St. Martin to stow away for her. We’ll never see a penny of it.”
“What makes you think she’s got it, in the first place?” I asked wearily.
“I’m not the only one who thinks so,” she answered, with a sort of subdued violence. “A. J. thinks so. He ought to know. Anyway, she’s the logical person to have it. It was her my father was cheating my mother for.”
“Are you sure of that, darling?” I asked, as patiently as I could.
She looked at me with dark burning eyes.
“I was under the impression he was ‘cheating your mother’ for his own satisfaction, and nobody else’s,” I said quietly. “Because he couldn’t bear for your mother to have his money when he died. You and Iris were quite secondary.”
“Me? And just where do I come in?”
“You come in for half of it,” I said. “Iris for the other.— I’m afraid you’ve entirely forgotten that when all this happened you and your mother were about as friendly as two stray wildcats, and as far as your father knew—because he seems to have known amazingly little about fundamental human nature—your mother would have been delighted for you to starve in Rock Creek Park.”
“She would not! She—”
“I know,” I said. “Your father didn’t know it. Three years ago you didn’t know it. And whatever you think about the ethics of what your father did, nobody can deny he was trying to make his money available for you and Iris.”
“With the result that she’s got the works and little Lowell gets a job in a department store.”
“She won’t keep it long,” I said.
“Why not?”
“Haven’t you ever heard about service with a smile?”
She looked at me with wide stormy eyes, caught her full under lip in her even white teeth and turned abruptly away, staring out of the window. I could see the outline of her firm little chin trembling. It occurred to me that a few tears were exactly what Lowell Nash needed to wash down the hard salty wall that had grown up around her heart. So I turned my back too and sat down on the sofa. And that was a mistake. I’d forgotten how young she really was, under all her brittle veneer… and I didn’t realize then how lonely, and how proud.
I closed my eyes. If I could only have time to think, it occurred to me, perhaps I could straighten out all this tangled mess, and put each strand in place. So many questions beat against my mind… and the last one was Why was Colonel Primrose going through the house now? He couldn’t possibly, as Lowell thought he was, be hunting Randall Nash’s lost treasure. That was the plainest nonsense.
Then I heard him and Sergeant Buck, in the back hall, coming up from the cellar. I sat up and looked at Lowell. I saw her jaw tighten as she turned, more sullen and stony-faced than ever.
“I suppose you know Mac isn’t interested in marrying me so quickly, now,” she said shortly, staring straight at me.
Colonel Primrose and Sergeant Buck were coming in before I could recover… and Lowell was standing there, her dark perfectly arched brows raised just a little, looking as bored and unconcerned as a movie queen in a corner drug store. I don’t know exactly when I gave up, but I imagine it was just then, if it wasn’t the moment before, when she’d turned round more icily sullen than ever when I’d thought she was set for a good cry.
15
Her brows raised still more as they came on into the library.
“What on earth have you got there?”
She pointed to the pasteboard carton Sergeant Buck had in his hand. The Sergeant looked down at it, and scratched his head.
“Why, it’s the box my father’s Christmas present came in!”
She answered her own question abruptly, looking with puzzled eyes from the carton to Colonel Primrose. “I don’t see…”
“I don’t either, really,” Colonel Primrose said. “It’s just one of the things detectives do when they’re licked. They go around picking up match sticks and stowing them away. That sort of thing.”
He took the carton from Buck. It was a regular manilla box with a picture of a patent syphon on it. It was called, apparently, “Johnny Mixer.” On the bottom of the carton I could read “Blue. One quart.”
The angry color seeped into Lowell’s cheeks.
“You’re not trying to make out…?” she began furiously.
“No, no, no,” Colonel Primrose said cheerfully. “I’m not trying to make anything out.”
He shook his forefinger under her nose in half-comical annoyance.
“If you could only get it into your pretty but incredibly stubborn little head that we’re after the truth, and not a general airing of private grievances, maybe we’d get along somewhere. You know, every crack you and A. J. take at Iris simply slows us up that much more.”
He sat down on the sofa by me, Sergeant Buck taking his usual sentry post at the door. Lowell blinked her dark eyes angrily.
“Don’t you see, my dear, that even when we’re pretty sure this statement or that comes from just sheer personal spite, we’ve got to stop and run it down, just on the off chance there’s something in it? If you would only in Heaven’s name give all that up, no matter what you think about your stepmother, and limit your spoken testimony to facts, we’d get along faster. Is that clear?”
Lowell looked down at him steadily. “She did poison my dog.”
“So far,” Colonel Primrose said evenly, “that’s your major contribution.”
His eyes were harder than I personally liked to see them. So were Lowell’s… but I’d got used to that.
“You know,” he went on slowly, “you may not know it, and you’ll probably be distressed to hear it—but that charge of yours is probably the single factor that’s kept your stepmother from being arrested and taken to jail.”
Lowell’s jaw dropped for an instant, and clamped shut again. She stared at him silently.
“If they hadn’t performed an autopsy on Senator McGilvray, and they only did it because you kept insisting she’d fed him poisoned candy, then they’d never have doubted for a minute that your father drank poisoned liquor… here in this room five minutes before his death. And now they’re not sure at all. And there’s no evidence that Iris had dry potassium cyanide in her possession, or that she had salol tablets, or that she’d know what to do with them if she had.”
“She did, I believe, have poison upstairs?” Lowell demanded icily.
Colonel Primrose nodded patiently.
“The point—as you’ve insisted on over and over again—is that your dog was also poisoned. The police now know— thanks to your insistence—that Senator McGilvray was poisoned with dry potassium, administered in enteric capsules. Not with a solution… which is what Iris had upstairs.”
Lowell’s face was a blank expressionless mask. Which meant nothing, of course, being the prevailing fashion in faces of her contemporaries. It was admirable for the present purpose, however. I couldn’t possibly have told how any of this affected her.
“Your implication—if that isn’t altogether too polite a word for it—was that because Iris had poison, and used it on McGilvray, she also used it on Randall. Well, it cuts two ways. You yourself pointed out—rather heatedly—the parallel between the two cases. And if the poison she had was not used on McGilvray, then it wasn’t necessarily that used to poison your father. In the one case, as you see—or as the police see at any rate—the kind of poison she had was definitely not used. And so, as it worked out… Iris ought to be very grateful to you.”
The color rose in Lowell’s face again. Her red lips tightened.
“She needn’t be—it was my mistake,” she said. “But you’ll never make me believe it.”
“I wouldn’t try to, Lowell.”
Colonel Primrose spoke very politely, but I noticed the sardonic lift of one bushy eyebrow.
“I gave up beating my head against stone walls when I was a year or so older than you are.”
Her face was perfectly expressionless.
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“However,” he went on coolly, “that’s really neither here nor there. What I’d like to know is this. When your father brought me that envelope to keep for him, he said if anything happened to him before he came to get it back, I was to give it to you.”
He looked at her steadily.
“Have you no memory, of anything he ever said to you, at any time, that bears on that, in any way at all?”
I don’t of course pretend I can read anything on the faces of the young. If Lowell was thinking, trying to recall the three past years, there was no evidence of it. She shook her head at last.
Colonel Primrose was watching her with a guarded intensity.
“Nothing occurs to you?”
She looked at him queerly. “Oh yes. Lots of things. I’m afraid they wouldn’t interest you. Just… more airing of private grievances, Colonel Primrose.”
He smiled suddenly. “Go on, Lowell.”
She came toward us and sat down in a chair by the desk, her face quite inscrutable.
“Well, in the first place, if as you say my father was planning to divide his estate equally between Iris and me, it stands to reason he’d want the two of us to know it. Not anybody else—if secrecy was so important. And of course it was… doing it the way he did.”
Colonel Primrose nodded.
“And so… if he told you to give the letter to me, wouldn’t it seem to follow that he was telling me because… because Iris already knew?”
The smile that had lingered in Colonel Primrose’s eyes vanished in a flash. Sergeant Buck’s hard face froze into solid granite. A faint smile lighted Lowell’s dark eyes for an instant.
“And if you think that’s just a crack at my stepmother,” she went on coolly, “you’ll probably have me hurled from the battlements for the next thing that occurs to me… since you’ve asked for it.”
“And what is that?” Colonel Primrose said politely.
“It is… this. As I understand the situation, from Mr. McClean, my father was turning his assets into cash, and trying to find somebody he trusted sufficiently to keep it for him… in order to defraud my mother of what he’d agreed to give her.”